Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Flaubert&s Parrot deals with Flaubert parrots bears & railways; with our sense of the past & our sense of abroad; with France & England life & art sex & death George Sand & Louise Colet aesthetics & redcurrant jam; & with its enigmatic narrator a retired English doctor whose life & secrets are slowly revealed A compelling weave of fiction & imaginatively ordered fact Flaubert&s Parrot is by turns moving & entertaining witty & scholarly & a tour de force of seductive originality